


Reflections in a Turning Mirror

by Steerpike13713



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Mirror Universe
Genre: Abduction, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Brainwashing, Dark, Disturbing Themes, Drabble Collection, M/M, Missed Opportunities, Non-Sexual Slavery, Restraints, Sexual Slavery, Species Dysphoria, Stockholm Syndrome, Unhappy Ending, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-20
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-20 09:24:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12429822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Steerpike13713/pseuds/Steerpike13713
Summary: In a world where the soulmate bond is considered the most fundamental of all sentient drives...there is still the mirrorverse. And in every version of the world, there is something to draw Elim Garak and Julian Bashir together, much as they may hate and resent that connection. All the ways in which having a soulmate bond changed things for Gul Garak and Captain Bashir...and all the ways it didn't.





	1. That Pass in the Night

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Indivisible and Unchangeable](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12332937) by [Steerpike13713](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Steerpike13713/pseuds/Steerpike13713). 



> Remixing one's own work is always a bit of a dubious business, but I've just had so many thoughts about soulmates in the mirrorverse, and all the ways that they might make things infinitely better or (knowing me, more probably) infinitely worse.

Gul Garak never sees colour.

He does not feel the lack of it, has known from his earliest education that he can rely only on himself, and a mate is only one more person he must protect, a life that might yet become dearer to him even than his own, and that is never to be borne.

It is alone, then, that he claws his way up through the ranks of the Cardassian Guard. A mate of appropriate standing might have eased his way for him, but a bastard from the service class may expect no such considerations. He has served more than eighteen years, by Cardassian reckoning, when he is gazetted Gul, and almost immediately sent to the backwater of Terok Nor, to obey the orders of some slip of a Bajoran half his age more concerned with the pursuit of her own indulgences than the strength of their great alliance or vengeance on the cursed Terrans who laid waste to both their planets before the old Empire fell. No sooner has he set foot on the station, than Garak is scheming to have it for his own.

He never ventures down into the deepest levels of the ore processing unit, where a Terran slave whose mother once called him ‘Jules’ labours in the dark and the filth and the sweltering heat. When that same Terran slave conspires with two others to overpower a Klingon guard and steal a shuttle, Garak signs the execution order without ever seeing him, and receives word of the Terrans' escape with no less fury than he would have felt for any other such act of defiance. But the enemy of one day is soon enough supplanted, and soon enough he cannot even remember the slave’s designation, and never learns his name.

A year later, a strange Terran from another world comes to the station, and Gul Garak sees…it is not colour, as he has heard it described. The world is tinted…strangely. A colour he learns is called ‘golden’ or ‘sepia’ creeps into the greys of the station and its environs, bleeding out from a _Terran_ no better than any of the slaves labouring in the ore processing facility.

The sepia shading of the world fades entirely after their visitors are gone, and even through the frustration of having failed to take the station from the Intendant, the Gul finds it in himself to be glad of the warning. And if he is troubled with dreams of that long, smooth neck, those dark eyes, that defiant tilt to the chin, it means nothing and less than nothing in waking life.

It does not save his career. The Terrans take Terok Nor just two years after the first incursion from the other side, and Garak is collared and bound and chained at the Klingon Regent’s feet for his failures. He knows the game, knows how to play it, but the Regent is of a different breed to the Intendant, less sensual, more brutal, and the manipulations that found such a ready audience in the Intendant fall on fallow soil here.

He is able to slip his way free, at last, and comes close to seeing her captured but, in the end, it is no use.

As he lies dying on the floor of a Klingon holding cell, the world he sees in his last moments is grey, grey, grey. On the bridge of the Defiant, Captain Bashir of the Terran Resistance sees the hateful Cardassian letters on his arm fade until they are faint as an old scar against the skin of his forearm, and feels nothing but relief at the loss.


	2. or else let him be mine and mine alone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ...this might actually be the darkest, most disturbing, definitely most uncomfortable thing I have ever written.  
>  Seriously, I cannot warn this enough - trigger warnings for rape, distorted perspective, some gore, and just all-round horror. DO NOT READ if any of this triggers you in any way, because I found it genuinely difficult not to be sick while writing it.  
> With that in mind...  
> The title is from 'Hellfire' from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and this is about as dark as this series is going to go.

Pursuing three escaped Terrans in a stolen shuttlecraft is a task beneath Garak’s talents, but the Intendant seems to delight in assigning him such duties, and Garak cannot outright disobey, not with their alliance with the Bajorans still so perilous. At any rate, it is an opportunity to indulge himself with no loss of workers, and such an act of defiance against the Alliance cannot be permitted.

He kills the first Terran he finds too quickly to take any pleasure in it, and the murdered Klingon officer’s mate fells the second. The third…that is different. The final Terran is in the engine room, and while the trap he is laying is crude, it is functional enough that, had Garak arrived any later, it would have blown the shuttle to pieces, and taken the borrowed Klingon Bird-of-Prey with it. Garak has the Terran by the throat with a knife in his free hand, enjoying the anticipation of the kill, when it begins. Brown, or almost-brown eyes, great and dark and gleaming with defiance. Golden-brown skin, filthy grey-brown rags, dark hair, red blood. Beautiful, he thinks, and knows not where the thought has come from. _His_.

He kills the Klingons when they reach him, rigs the shuttle to explode, hits his prize hard enough to send it sprawling, dazed, to the floor, then binds it hand and foot and hides it as best he can in the back of the shuttle. So far as anyone on Terok Nor will know, those two Klingons died when he sent them in ahead of him to clear the way, only to find the Terrans had set a trap for them. It will not be the first such occurrence.

He knows Terok Nor well enough, now, that it is easy to conceal the Terran’s presence for as long as it takes to reach Garak’s own bare quarters, to lay the unconscious Terran on his bed, collar him and restrain him there, and write up his report as if he does not see, now, for the first time, just how dull, how bleak, how lifeless his quarters are, in comparison with golden skin and rich, bright blood and skin that is sleek and smooth and fascinating in its lack of scale or ridge or any sort of adornment.

The Terran fights, of course, when he wakes. He spits and snarls and lashes out until Garak is obliged to bind his hands once again to the headboard, curses his name as Garak traces his claws over the words on the Terran’s wrist. In clear Kardasi script, there, _Elim Garak_. As good as a brand of ownership, put there not by knife or brand or needle but a part of the skin itself, and for all the scars around it, all the places where, so clearly, someone has tried to blot the Kardasi letters out, there it remains. At first, Garak tries to gentle him, but soon loses patience, but hitting the Terran has no more effect than any of those clumsy attempts to soothe him. All the Terran does is laugh, blood on its teeth, and spit at him when Garak tries to draw closer. It does not tell Garak its name, and its designation is an unwieldy string of numbers and letters. For now, Garak has no other name for it but ‘Mine’.

The first time they are joined is more like a battle than an act of love. There is blood, Garak’s and the Terran’s. Garak’s lip is split from a vicious bite, his face bruised where the Terran has headbutted him. The Terran’s wrists are bloody from fighting against its restraints, and there is blood when Garak runs his fingers down the cleft of the Terran’s buttocks afterwards – the Terran body is not made for such relations as easily as the Cardassian form – but all the same, he counts it as a victory.

The Terran is no easy conquest, but after some thought, Garak concludes that neither would he be, if the old Empire had endured and he found himself thus at the mercy of a Terran master. He can expect no less from his mate, his match, his Revelation than he would offer himself, and what the Terran offers is nothing but blood and sweat and bile, leaving Garak bruised and bloody after every coupling, even if every time the Terran comes off the worse for it. And yet…and yet, it is not enough.

When Garak talks to the Terran, it glares balefully at him, silent, or spits insults if its throat is well enough to allow for it. When he attempts to use his mouth on that gaudy Terran approximation of a prUt, the Terran tries to pull away, and snarls insults in a garbled mixture of three languages. Garak had not hoped for an easy victory, but time brings no submission, and he has not the patience for hand-taming the Terran. His Terran, broken and tamed to his hand, would be a thing of beauty, and the image of it haunts his dreams and his waking hours with a persistence that is sharp and painful to think of, even as the real thing remains sharp-edged, sullen, spitting venom with every attempt Garak makes to draw it closer.

Perhaps it is that distraction which loses Garak everything. Or maybe- Maybe it is only that the presence of the other Terran, the one from the other world, who calls itself ‘Julian’ and greets Garak with open shock and something almost like pleasure is so close and yet so far from what he truly wants that the Terran – the Julian, if that truly is its name – that Garak already has almost slips from his mind. He will have his Terran – his _Terrans_ , why not, and perhaps the other world’s Julian will help gentle his counterpart, the same way keeping a gelded riding hound with a stud dog can calm a wild beast’s temper – and the Intendant’s position, and then, maybe, he would rise yet higher.

It does not succeed. The other world’s Julian slips away, Sisko the Intendant’s pet slips his leash and turns renegade, and when Garak returns to his quarters at the end of a long and stressful day to find his bed empty and the words ‘NOT THINGS’ scratched into the bulkhead with what looks to have been one of his own knives, the worst thing of all is that, on some level, he has known this was coming from the start.


	3. False Colours

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Inspired a bit by the fate of mirrorverse Annika Hansen.

Even fate makes mistakes. It is a knowledge all Cardassians – all those possessed, in any case, of enough common sense to recognise that the State’s truth is not the only truth, even if they may never say so aloud – carry with them. Even fate makes mistakes, and the Revelation is the ground for far too many of them. For every meeting that ends in a proper enjoinment, the begetting of children, the proper form of the Cardassian state, there are always a handful that defy it. Great Guls and Legates find their breath catching and the world awash with colour when they meet a housekeeper’s eyes, twin siblings see colour almost from the moment of their birth, even a handful prove incapable of true Cardassian pair-bonds, and so attach themselves to lesser species. Even fate makes mistakes. Fortunately, all mistakes can be remedied.

Cesnil had another name, before. He isn’t permitted to remember it, and so he doesn’t. He suspects it may have been unpronounceable, to a Cardassian tongue, and since that is the sort he now has, learning it would avail him not at all. He had another family, as well, another face, but he cannot remember them, now, just as he cannot remember his Terran name. The Mark, though. That is unavoidable. _Elim Garak_ , written cleanly on his arm in Elim’s familiar flourished, formal script. Just _Elim_ , for years, until he was presented to Dal Garak and saw the Dal’s face light up with a delight that was, he flatters himself, almost as much personal as political. Cesnil’s father had not been best-pleased, at first, but Tekeny Ghemor did not rise to become head of the Obsidian Order without a good sense of when to take his opportunities, and Elim made his name as a protégé of Legate Tain, although the truth, Cesnil’s father revealed to him in confidence shortly before their first meeting, is rather more sordid. Elim, like himself, is the result of another fated mistake. The bastard son of a Legate and his housekeeper, raised in the household but – so far as Tekeny had been able to find out, and his father is a _master_ at his trade – still unaware of his parentage. Enjoinment to such a man would be a boon to the Order, and so it was permitted.

With the Ghemor name to bolster him, Elim’s promotion was quite assured. Unfortunately, with it came the loss of Legate Tain’s favour, and the end of Elim’s usefulness in that regard. It had been Cesnil’s suggestion to send them to Terok Nor, to attend to the situation there – already, Bajor was gaining far too much control over the project, and that was not to be borne – but he had been reckoning without the Terrans.

“It is difficult to believe you were ever one of them,” Elim murmurs against his neck-ridges, the first night they spend on the station.

“I’m not!” Cesnil snaps, and rolls away. “I never was, truly. Would you suffer to have a Terran open your eyes?”

Elim makes an irritable little hissing noise, low in his throat. “I thought we had just established you are not a Terran.”

“And never was,” Cesnil says firmly, insistently, “Not where it matters. Not underneath.”

Elim smiles at him. It is not a kind expression, but they are neither of them kind men.

“Of course not.”

Cesnil has never been vain, he thinks, but he has never spent so much time looking in the mirror as he does on the station. He isn’t sure whether it’s to find traces of the Terran face that had once been his, or to reassure himself that no sign of it yet remains. He’s always been called handsome, on Cardassia – a fine long neck and curved nose coupled with money and a good family name will do that for anyone, even a once-Terran foundling brought, against all expectation, into the family of the head of the Obsidian Order – and that, he is sure, is nothing that could have been whelped in any Terran litter. There is nothing in their voices or their ways that calls to him – rough, crude jeering in an ugly pidgin of Klingon and Kardasi mixed with a hundred dialects of what Cesnil supposes to be Terran, an absolute want of pride, of discipline, of even the most basic understanding of why the world must be this way. No wonder the old Empire fell, he thinks to himself, whenever he is obliged to go down to the refinery itself, and that is blessedly rare. A political officer’s duty lies elsewhere, and he is glad of that. No once-Terran can be placed in a position of authority over slaves – there have been too many defections. He does not understand why. Fate may make mistakes, but Cardassians need not, and whatever he may have begun as, he _is_ a Cardassian.

It’s only after the first time he sees a Mark, smooth and eerie on human skin, red as Terran blood and not filtered black through scales, that he begins to feel uneasy with such classifications. Terrans laid waste to the galaxy and enslaved Cardassia itself, once, he reminds himself when those thoughts come upon him. They are riding a pendulum. The sins of their forebears revisited upon them even unto the ninth generation, if that is what it takes to recoup Cardassia’s losses in the long centuries of Imperial rule that came before the rise of the Alliance.

And then the other world opens up to them, as it hasn’t in more than a hundred years, and all his flint-sharp certainties are turned to glass.

He knows about the Terran and Bajoran from the other world because Elim tells him about them. He is laughing, flushed charcoal, triumphant, eyes bright, his hands hard enough on Cesnil’s wrists to raise delicious bruises that might even show through his scales.

“-‘Ghemor’, he kept repeating,” Elim adds, with a wide smile, “He called me ‘Garak’ when he first saw me – I suppose that means he knows my counterpart, and that he hasn’t-”

An odd chill goes through Cesnil at that, and when Elim moves to kiss him again, he turns his head away.

Quite what it means – that Elim is still ‘Garak’ in the other world, that the Terran knows him, that they’ve found no match on this side despite their Bajoran visitor being their very own despised Intendant Kira – is something Cesnil manages to avoid thinking of almost entirely until he returns to their quarters to find an unconscious Terran lying prone across their bed, _Elim Garak_ written across his wrist in a Mark that is almost the twin of Cesnil’s own. Not quite, though. The Mark on the Terran’s arm is that same rich Terran blood red, Cesnil’s harsh and jet black, but it’s close enough.

He stops in the doorway, his knees lock, his breath comes short and sharp, and then he’s in and the door is sealed behind him and he has Elim up against the wall by the collar.

“What is _that_?” he hisses, furious, into his husband’s face.

“…the Terran.” Elim is many things, but when he’s quiet, it’s a danger sign. “Apparently he was being insolent to Odo. I happened upon the beating and…saw.” His eyes drop to Cesnil’s arm.

“This…” Cesnil forces out through a tongue that is suddenly thick and heavy and clumsy as it hasn’t been since the fork was cut into it more than twenty years ago, “This doesn’t mean anything. Why didn’t you leave it for Odo?”

“And risk the Terrans learning more than they ought?” Elim inquires, barbed, “We both know what Sisko would make of that.”

It is true. The Terrans loathe those of their own kind who aspire to better their condition more even than they hate born Cardassians. Sisko has already been present for a number of ‘accidents’ for Cardassians who, when Cesnil dug a little deeper into their pasts, proved to have a common secret. He only needs proof now, and then even the Intendant will not be able to protect her plaything from the consequences of his actions.

“It might work to lure him out,” Cesnil muttered, more to himself than Elim. “The others didn’t suspect him – I know better. If I can get him into a position where-”

He stops. The Terran is stirring.

This close to, there is no denying the resemblance. The neck is the same, long and finely curved, even bare of scales and ridges and rendered in warm golden-brown. They have almost the same nose, but for a gracing of ridges down Cesnil’s, the same heavy-lidded eyes even without the ring of orbital ridges to accentuate their shape, the same long, lean build. They are his own eyes that blink open and widen in a Terran face, his own voice – strangely accented, without the crisp Kardasi’or inflections that had been drilled into him from the moment he was brought to Cardassia – that demands to know where it has been brought, and already, Cesnil is lost.


	4. Darker Than Death Or Night

Jules isn’t inexperienced in these matters. How can he be? People have called him ‘pretty’ for as long as he can remember, and he doesn’t remember a time before he knew what it was the Cardassians did with Terrans they liked the look of. He was fourteen, the first time an overseer pulled him aside and forced him to his knees. He fought, that time, and bled, but he’d made damn sure that Cardassian overseer bled too, bit down deep and even the beating that had followed hadn’t made that moment’s defiance any less sweet. And yet, somehow, it never stopped them trying.

So, when he’s dragged onto Terok Nor and the Gul overseeing their arrival takes one look at him and orders Jules bathed and taken to his quarters, Jules knows what is coming, and readies himself for a fight. Maybe they’ll kill him, this time – Glinn Dukat had come close, on Bajor, after arrogantly disregarding the other overseers’ warnings that, if no-one but Jules would do, then a gag and bonds might be advisable, if Dukat wanted to come out of it intact – and maybe they won’t, and he’ll be sent straight back to the ore refinery until the next butcher decides they’d like a turn. He has no idea what he’s meant to do when the pattern breaks.

The Gul is no less a monster than any other Cardassian slave-driver, Jules cannot let himself forget that. But he never lays a hand on Jules. There is food, in the Gul’s quarters, and he is invited to eat freely, and though the Gul watches him with hungry eyes, he keeps his hands to himself. There is a bed, too, wide and more comfortable than anywhere Jules has ever slept, and though he lies awake all night half-dreading, half-anticipating the moment the Gul will roll over and give Jules the fight he’s already nearly buzzing with the need for, it never comes.

He is not permitted to leave the Gul’s quarters. The restraint collar is, the Gul claims, for his own protection, but it will not let him leave. Jules’ world is narrowed to a bedroom, a ‘fresher, a large main room full of books he cannot read. He breaks a few ornaments, that first day, just in sheer frustration. A techie might be able to break the collar open and get out. Someone with a bit more strength to them might power through the shocks and win their freedom that way. Jules is neither. He tries anyway, and when the Gul returns that night, it is to find Jules curled and twitching on the floor from yet another bout of shocks, too dazed and too weak even to spit at the Cardie as it bends over him, lifts him, carries him back through to the bed and fetches a dermal regenerator for his injuries, attending to him a little clumsily, but with slow and thorough care. Jules has nothing to say to him, but the Gul talks anyway.

“-shouldn’t happen again…too wilful…suppose…only to be expected-”

Jules drifts in and out of consciousness to the sound of the Gul’s voice, and cannot even muster up the strength to sneer. When he drifts back, it is to the sound of the Gul’s voice again, reading or reciting, and he blinks open his eyes to see the Gul lying beside him with a PADD in his hands, to see his bare arm lying beside his head, the hateful Kardasi script that he has tried so many times to blot out with burns and cuts and bruises redder than ever, nearly glowing, and nearly twice the length they had been.

The Gul looks down at him, and Jules cannot name the expression on his face as he leans down, and traces a claw gently – too gently, far too gently for Jules’ liking – along the letters there.

“Elim Garak,” the Gul says, with a tight, satisfied little smile, nearly devouring Jules with his eyes. “I presume you never learnt to read?”

Jules tries to snarl out that even if he had done, there’ve got to be better things to read in this universe than Cardie slave-marks, but there isn’t enough wet in his throat to let him, and the sound he makes is halfway between a cough and a creak instead.

Even in the mines, people had known what the Mark was. It’d been damn near sacred, under the old Empire. Here…well, Jules’d seen too early what tended to happen to slaves with Cardie marks. He’d covered it over, tried to burn it out, and seen the letters return each time redder than before. Cardies saw them as an insult, Terrans saw them as traitors waiting to happen. Fuck the lot of them, Jules thought savagely. No-one decided for him, not gods, not fates, not this fucking Cardassian Gul that those things had apparently picked out for him, as if all there can be to Jules’s life is lying in the Gul’s bed with his legs spread, begging with his belly up for treats from his spoonhead masters. To hell with them all.

As soon as he’s strong enough to speak, he rages against the Gul, goads him, mocks him, curses him in Kardasi and Klingon and the hodgepodge of old Terran he knows. Anything to end the waiting, one way or the other. It comes close, once, to working, he sees the rage flash across the Gul’s face, sees his hand draw back for the blow…and then sees it all drain from his face at the sight of the Mark. Enraged, he snarls out another taunt, but this time the Gul just…takes it, leaves their quarters, and comes back with blood on his uniform and some sort of warm brown solid foodstuff that tastes unlike anything Jules has ever had before, sweet and thick and creamy, and the noise he makes when he first tastes it makes the hunger in the Gul’s eyes flare up all the brighter. _Now,_ he thinks, _now_. But it does not come. A hand lands on the back of his neck, strokes over Jules’ hair as if he is an animal to be petted. He tries to snap, to bite, but the Gul’s hand is too quick for him, is everywhere his teeth are not, and it is _maddening_. Jules can spit at the Gul, and snarl at him, can try to strangle him bare-handed, try to escape so many times that it seems like the prickle of electricity is always under his skin, and yet the Gul always pins him down, strokes his hair, brings him treats, reads to him from the books Jules cannot read, and tends his injuries with hands gentler than Jules knew a Cardassian's could be.

In the end, it is the anticipation that breaks him.

Their arrangement does not change. The food, the bed, the Gul talking to him each evening about ordinary, mundane things – his frustrations with his subordinates, the Intendant’s latest extravagance, the things he wished for from Cardassia – and at some point, after the last of Jules’ curses run out it becomes ordinary. To meet the Gul at the door when he comes in, and listen to his talk, and ask questions when questions occur to him, at first just to vex the Gul, but more and more often as time goes on for the only news of the world beyond these three rooms he ever hears. The Gul’s hands are no longer strictly kept to himself, now – far too often Jules finds them on his arm or waist or shoulder, or carding through his hair – but they do not stray far. Soon enough, he scarcely notices. It is not long after that that the Gul becomes ‘Elim’, at his own insistence. It is not very long after that that he starts to see qualities in Elim that he did not in the Gul. He will not raise a hand to Jules. This means little enough – Jules has heard enough out of Elim’s own mouth to know that he has hurt any number of others – and yet, somehow in Jules’ head it becomes significant. He likes words and books and stories. This too means nothing – the stories the Gul can pull from a resisting Terran are proof of that – and yet it becomes something to enjoy, when he reads aloud of an evening, or tells the events of his day over so that Jules cannot help but laugh at his biting impersonations of his incompetent juniors, of the Klingon reinforcements, of the Intendant herself, whom Jules has never seen. He is lonely, and this means least of all, when loneliness is the least of the troubles that has dogged Jules’s life. But still, even this begins to work its way beneath a skin rendered newly tender with warmth and good food and the first softness Jules has known in a lifetime’s hard struggle.

It has been three years since Jules last saw another Terran's face. Sometimes, he tries to remember them - his mother, say, although he was taken from her so young that her face is the barest suggestion in his memory. Palis, who died beside him in the mines on Bajor, hacking up foul black bile, her jaw swollen and rotting away from the inside with the phossy. Felix, who was chained in the same cell on the transport that brought them to Terok Nor. None of it works. Slowly, he almost starts to forget there are other Terrans. He hears so little, sees only these three rooms, until they become his world, and the whole of it, here on a backwater ore refinery light years away from the world on which he was born.

In the end, when Elim’s hands finally catch Jules by the chin and pull him close to kiss, Jules goes willingly, or as willingly as a prisoner who knows no other face but his captor’s can. He sinks to his knees without being urged, this time, lies warm in the depths of his jailor’s bed and can call himself content with it, lets the part of himself that has fought from the moment it fought its way out into the world rest, dazed and drugged by food and warmth and comfort.

He does not know how long after that it is that he looks in the mirror after bathing – real water, enough of it to immerse a whole body in, more luxury than he has ever known – and does not know the face that looks back on him. Clear-skinned, clean-shaven, healthy, hair grown long and glossy in his captivity, body filled out into smooth clean lines and strength he has no longer any use for.

He does not know when it was that the end of the fight ceased to be a wary truce and became a surrender.

When the station is taken, he is smuggled out with Elim, and so it is his neck the Klingon regent breaks for Elim’s failures, and even with the Regent's hands tight at his throat, he finds he can no longer fight at all.


End file.
